Friday, February 3, 2017

News from the Network, Vol. 10, No. 05

This
has been a somewhat quiet week for action, but a full week of important
meetings.Admittedly actions are easier
to report than meetings, but meetings sometimes have far more reaching
resulting in actions.In any event, here
are this week’s news items:

• Norman Kurland met with an
official at the World Bank who was very impressed with what he heard about
monetary and fiscal reforms that would be made possible by Just Third Way
reforms.The meeting was a follow up to
an earlier meeting with an associate of the World Bank official.Key to the success of the meeting was the
Bank official’s immediate grasp of the definition of money in the Just Third
Way: “anything that can be accepted in settlement of a debt; all things
transferred in commerce.”Once this
definition is internalized and embodied in policy, there is no longer any need
for governments to issue debt to back the currency, and commercial and central
banks can be put to their proper use of monetizing existing production and
financing new capital formation with future savings.

• Discussions have taken place with
a group in the U.S. Midwest working on developing a new model of business along
Just Third Way lines within the constraints imposed by existing law.By using a Subchapter-S corporate structure
and making all workers equally owners, participation and production (and, given
current market demand, profits) will be optimized.The value of the labor contributions will, of
course, reflect the current market, but the main income component for most
participants is expected to be dividends paid on shares, thereby tending to
level out total compensation, greatly decreasing the gap resulting from the
differential in the market rates for labor.

Why create "jobs" when you can create ownership and wealth?

• If successful, the project could
be replicated easily and quickly, helping to shift U.S. economic policy from
the failed Keynesian goal of “full employment” to the Kelsonian goal of “full
ownership.”Instead of “job creation”
programs that represent a drain on the public treasury, “wealth creation”
programs restore the tax base and increase the flow of revenue to government at
the same time it decreases the burden of welfare and entitlements, ultimately
leading to a decrease in the tax rate.

• An added bonus to the project
would be to demonstrate through the financing how to replace today’s
politically controlled money supply backed with government debt, with an
economically determined money supply backed with private sector hard assets —
the first step in putting the money power back in the hands of the people, and
taking it away from the politicians and those who control existing
accumulations of savings.

"The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg"

• By pure chance we discovered the
work of Professor Julian Strube of Heidelberg University in Baden-Württemburg,
Germany (not the Heidelberg University in Northwest Ohio), which corroborates
our findings about the connection between socialism and “esoteric” philosophy,
and the unfortunate effect this has had on the interpretation of Catholic
social teaching.According to Dr. Strube
(which agrees with the Catholic
Encyclopedia), with the “Enlightenment” and spread of socialism in the
eighteenth century, a new mythology of Christianity began to appear,
distinguishing between “true” Christianity, and the corrupt version of the
Catholic and Protestant Churches, especially the Catholic Church.“True” Christianity is socialist, and Jesus
was the first socialist revolutionary.Instead of working toward salvation in the next life, perfection is to
be attained in this life through socialism and the deification of humanity; the
social order is to be based on charity instead of justice, or justice must be
redefined to become charity.The Will
rather than the Intellect must be the basis of understanding human nature and
thus the natural law.There is much more,
of course, but the interesting thing is that an important socialist, Henri de
Saint-Simon, wrote a book in 1825 titled The
New Christianity, which became the basis of a cult (with its own pope!) that
had a great deal of influence even after the cult itself faded away by the
1880s.The New or Neo Christian
movement, a confusing mishmash of socialism, esoteric beliefs, and rationalism,
eventually morphed into what became known as the New Age and influenced the rise
of modernism.According to the Catholic Encyclopedia article on “Saint-Simonism”
and to the Vicomte de Vogüé, a Neo Christian, Leo XIII’s reference to “new
things” (rerum novarum) in his 1891 encyclical on labor and capital was
directed primarily to the socialist foundation of the New Christian movement and
the redefinition of justice as charity — “New Christian” was, in fact, used
interchangeably with “socialist” during the nineteenth century.

• CESJ’s latest book (makes a great
pre-Easter gift . . . obviously), Easter
Witness: From Broken Dream to a New Vision for Ireland, is available from Amazon
and Barnes
and Noble, as well as by special order from many “regular” bookstores.The book can also be ordered in bulk, which
we define as ten copies or more of the same title, at a 20% discount.A full case is twenty-six copies, and
non-institutional/non-vendor purchasers get a 20% discount off the $20 cover
price on wholesale lots ($416/case).Shipping is extra. Send enquiries
to publications@cesj.org.An additional discount may be available for
institutions such as schools, clubs, and other organizations as well as
retailers.

Beer makes you smile, too!

• Here’s the usual announcement
about the Amazon Smile program,
albeit moved to the bottom of the page so you don’t get tired of seeing
it.To participate in the Amazon Smile
program for CESJ, go to https://smile.amazon.com/.Next, sign in to your account.(If you don’t have an account with Amazon,
you can create one by clicking on the tiny little link below the “Sign in using
our secure server” button.)Once you
have signed into your account, you need to select CESJ as your charity — and
you have to be careful to do it exactly this way: in the
space provided for “Or select your own charitable organization” type “Center for Economic and Social Justice
Arlington.”If you type anything
else, you will either get no results or more than you want to sift
through.Once you’ve typed (or copied
and pasted) “Center for Economic and
Social Justice Arlington” into the space provided, hit “Select” — and you
will be taken to the Amazon shopping site, all ready to go.

• We have had
visitors from 55 different countries and 52 states and provinces in the United
States and Canada to this blog over the past two months. Most visitors are from
the United States, the United Kingdom, Nigeria, Australia, and Canada. The most
popular postings this past week in descending order were “News from the
Network, Vol. 10, No. 01,” “The Anti-Francis Effect, I: Leo & Francis,” “The
Anti-Francis Effect, II: Leo’s Vision,” “What Would Aquinas Do? — The Refugee
Crisis,” and “The Purpose of Production.”

Those are the happenings for this
week, at least those that we know about.If you have an accomplishment that you think should be listed, send us a
note about it at mgreaney [at] cesj [dot] org, and we’ll see that it gets into
the next “issue.”If you have a short
(250-400 word) comment on a specific posting, please enter your comments in the
blog — do not send them to us to post for you.All comments are moderated, so we’ll see it before it goes up.